by Alan Duff
July 1953, the people celebrate in the streets. Rákosi has been summoned to Moscow and removed from Prime Ministerial office by the new Soviet leadership under Krushchev. Imre Nagy, a popular politician previously pushed aside, is back as our premier. We all know he’s a loyal Communist, but he’s humane and does not wear the gloat of power on his face.
My father, though, who seems back on the path to his old self, warns us that Rákosi will be back, and when he returns it will be with added vengeance. But that seems far off, if never, and I go out with Pál into our streets, feeling this time as if we really own them.
I’M AT THIS doorway, halfway down the street from the famous New York Café I’ve just passed to see Ávós and Soviet army officers dining, fuming as I try the door — and it opens, on aged, squeaking hinges — to a courtyard striped and pocketed with hard shadows.
Normally Pál would be with me but today he’s not well. I’m jumping out of my skin at something, but can’t figure what. And so angry at seeing those arseholes enjoying food that we can only dream about. Fucking hypocrites, telling us to keep enduring in the name of Communism’s future, whilst they live exactly like the capitalists they removed.
I step through this door into a courtyard, of four floors of balconies facing inwards; it’s cool for summer, the sun’s not up high enough yet. Cool and all over with hard edges and cut lines and rust browning balcony railings, a steel fire-escape, corroded drainpipes, damp corners in permanent shadow. There’s a regular dripping somewhere, like a clock ticking down these people’s lives, and the sense of misery everywhere of them knowing it. For the wish that Imre Nagy’s leadership would make life better has not been granted. Our economic situation has got worse.
The washing strung diagonally across from balcony to balcony is drab and worn. What am I doing here? Yet something keeps me right where I am: trespassing. Then I notice the washing garments are without colour. The bastard authorities have bled our lives of colour, being choice.
There is colour, of a kind, when a sun ray breaks over the roof four storeys up, burnishes soft yellow where it touches. A baby makes muffled bawl and I feel eyes somewhere on me — look up. A woman, in her fifties, grey and tired, giving off the usual dark suspicion, all of it in a single expression down at me.
I remember from when we lived in one of these buildings, with its eyes turned inwards on itself, residents looking into each other’s windows, musicians would come and play an accordion, a violin, dance a little jig, tell a joke, sing for coins. And lighten heavy hearts. So I’d better sing or dance or play something, or get the hell out of here.
Hey, Miklós? I call out to a non-existent person at ground level. And I walk for first one door, then another. If she calls to me there is no Miklós in this building, then I’ll leave. But I hear a door closing above. The old hag has gone.
Down here I smell woman. Being perfume. Should I knock? What will I say? I whirl at the sound of a door opened abruptly, the one to my right, annoyed at myself for being taken by surprise.
Igen? A woman’s voice before she becomes a face — a tart’s face, and silk stockings below. I have seen my mother in these but once, when her mother acquired a pair some years ago, and Mama was so delighted. We heard her and Papa doing their business, and in our puerile understanding figured it was somehow to do with the silk stockings.
An apparition stands in the doorway, leaning against the frame; it has a cigarette in the corner of rouged lips, lidded eyes, which I think are green but false eyelashes won’t tell me. Paprika aroma issues from behind her. Is that beef I smell? Poor people don’t get to eat that, except fatty brisket bones and occasionally offal.
She looks surprised, at my youth I guess. I think she’s a prostitute. She gives me a languid look, shrugs and gestures me in. Inside there’s no natural light, and of course it’s small; the windows blocked out by dark blue curtains. The floor is covered in rugs, thick fluffy ones, and there’s a glass display cabinet with crockery things in it. By my standards, luxury. Privilege, but surely not official.
On a shelf a big valve radio is on a foreign-language station, English I think. I’d say she also listens to Szabad Európa Rádió, the Hungarian translated version, she looks naughty enough.
There’s a vase with flowers — how long since I have seen flowers in any of the homes I go to? I want to touch them, I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to flowers, not in someone’s home. I like the yellow petals. Over there a silky piece of brilliantly coloured and patterned material slung over an armchair; bits and pieces everywhere like a junk shop to which my parents once took me and Béla on a trip in the countryside. Before the government closed all private businesses down.
Next she’s asking me to produce my money, swearing and threatening to call her heavy friends to sort me out, because I don’t have any.
I can smell men here, different male odours, and cigarettes, alcohol residue. Someone’s smoked a pipe recently. There’s another smell: of sex, I think. Bad sex. With her. Upon her, but not at one with her. Yet she looks clean. And she’s calmed down a bit and wears a funny amused smile.
Kid, you’ve got no idea, have you, who and what you’ve stumbled upon?
(Now I don’t want to look a fool, nor expose my younger years in front of anyone, let alone a whore.) I’d heard one of you lived in this building, I lie.
One of you what?
You know.
The smile she gives makes me acutely conscious of my youth. You’re a handsome one, I’ll say that. But, kid, I don’t give it for free, even to handsome boys. Understand? And goes to show me the door.
But if I’m young, I’m also an opportunist. Please lady, now I’m here, let me stay a bit. Promise I won’t try anything.
Her name is Izabella. She’s originally from Sopron, a town by the Austrian border. She’s telling me she never looked across to the lights of democratic freedom like most others, but dreamed of the bright lights of Budapest. Then she’s talking about people being what they’re born and this is what she was born, a prostitute, and with no regrets. And yet no joy either, kid. Just this kind of sad understanding of my fellow humans, the male species, being, you’ll appreciate, the ones with the power.
I spend over an hour being educated on her clients, the Secret Police not least. Of their perversions and strange requests. Of the secret man coming out in this, her boudoir. Insights she’s gained of males, or the type who use her services at any rate. The same who cause us suffering. The ones who have the power and yet she knows better, underneath they are but weaklings and troubled souls and plain evil beings.
Lights keep going on. I can’t wait to tell Pál.
Her client list is just about all in government employ, and mostly married. They come to be whipped, do violence to her, eat her faeces served on a silver platter, weep and blubber like babies, dress up and have her dress up, make weird confession, use her as an outlet for macabre and twisted political and life theories and only half the time for simple sex. Kid, to these weirdoes, nothing is simple. She doesn’t know the half of the enlightenment she’s giving me.
Twice we are interrupted by prospective clients knocking on the door and she has turned them away. Which I might be responsible for and I feel kind of special, almost privileged. Maybe lucky too, I hope, because she’s growing on me. Unless it’s my youth again, my surging hormones.
The politics of our country she knows from her range of clients. She can see I struggle with her claim to be in accord with my thinking when she sleeps with the enemy. It does not make me one of them, she tells me very firmly, and I believe her.
I learn that sexual experience with a prostitute is as far from love as we are from democracy. Yet as the time whiles away and she talks and smokes and now and then giggles like an innocent little girl, I find a different kind of wanting for her. Sexual, sure, but more than that. Except how would I tell her, and anyway, where is my money?
Yet it is her who invites me back — for a good time — in two we
eks.
I hardly recognise her when she answers the door. Her hair was rinsed blonde last, and she had make-up and turned-up eyelashes and painted lips, whilst this person is auburn, of ordinary eyelashes, no lipstick, no make-up, so maybe I’m a day, or a few hours earlier, got the time wrong? But she looks pleased to see me and ushers me in.
I’m out of my depth, haven’t the faintest idea of how to begin whatever preliminaries, if any, that come with this pending act. First I want to know if she’s okay, if something bad hasn’t happened and my timing doesn’t suit.
But she wears an odd, quizzical expression. And then she starts — to talk. Kid, I can’t give you a newly born woman, an innocent. For I have never been that, I don’t know why. My childhood was not so bad it could justify this occupation. I just found myself doing it. You look like this is your first time, and normally I wouldn’t care if your thousandth. Just get it over with, I’d tell you. Know what I’m saying?
No, I don’t know what she’s saying. Since I’m not here to get it over with, I want an experience. Maybe I even want a kind of love. At least for as long as it lasts.
She says, Young man, there isn’t any type I haven’t seen in this room. Until you, that is.
(Until me?) Lady, don’t think I’m something I’m not. I’ll only disappoint you.
But I didn’t understand. Not until she talked a bit more, about even a woman like her being entitled to one act of sexual purity, of one act of standing outside her sordid everyday life and being someone else, stuff like that. Which was meeting some resistance in sinking in.
Then she informs, Izabella is not my name. My parents named me Klaudia. Like so many of our parents, opting for foreign names and not our traditional own, as if being Hungarian is never quite enough, or not quite right. I feel like a Klaudia. Today I do. Foreign and yet myself. My old self. Before I made my choice.
Somehow I was sitting on the edge of the bed and that’s how her hand was placed on my thigh. I turned into her face, and saw the weariness going, like glad flight; I saw every little line, the map of finely drawn skin beneath eyes without make-up. Like today, this day, she told and gave the truth of herself, the smoke on our breaths of the cigarettes we’d shared, the words coming from those lips, of welcome.
And she made me a man.
THE BUILDING WHISPERS speculation, wild guesses convinced they’re deadly accurate, on the new neighbours who have moved in. A young married couple, they must be plants installed by the Ávós. The wife is too aristocratic looking, this is not her kind of neighbourhood, are the Ávós that stupid they think we can’t see through this one? Ask them some trick questions, where they originate from, where do they work, name relations and friends, see if anyone knows any of them.
The neighbours come out of their listlessness, their cold-hearted cynicism, into animated discussions on every landing, outside every door, outside our building, whispering about this couple on the trams.
Find out their official work classification to see if it fits how they appear. Look closely at his hands — do they look like a factory-worker’s hands? Have you seen the way she walks, with head held higher than an old Habsburg aristocrat. Who does she think she is? How does she think she’ll get away with it, surrounded by us, ordinary folk? You’d think the Ávós could have sent someone less obvious than her. She looks like a film star. As if there is such a thing in a Communist country.
They’re all talking: Don’t trust her. I never did like green eyes on a black-haired woman: it’s a genetic flaw, a sign of evil. And he, he looks like one of those architect types, a scarf wearer, a pipe-smoker, too old for his years; he’s much too serious. He must be an academic removed from his position, isn’t that what the government does, change everyone’s status? Or he’s from the bourgeois class, or he’s been trained to seem as if he is, the better to get people on side to betray them. Don’t trust a man who walks and talks like that. Nor a woman so beautiful it’s obvious she’s a plant.
This is what I hear, but have yet to set eyes on this couple. The men talk of her in sexual, physical terms, how they’d like to fuck her, to get her down on it, bend her over and give it to her. I guess they won’t last long around here.
I must be the only person in the building who has yet to set eyes on this couple yet I share the same suspicion. One night, as my father sits at the table eating with the pig habits he came home with, I ask if he’s heard of the new residents in our building, not really expecting much more than the usual disinterested grunt. The man we thought was heading to normal is not back after all.
He doesn’t say anything, keeps eating Mama’s nightly fare of chicken off-cut stews, sucking and picking at the bones without dignity, plucking bits of meat off the rib cage. I’m about to leave this pig to it when he speaks.
Where are you going? You ask me a question then you get up to leave?
I sit down again. Surprised is not the word — shocked might be. (Papa? Is it you? Has some part of you returned?) Sorry. (Can’t get myself to add Papa.)
I have seen them, he says as he sucks on a clawed foot, the sound it makes is like gristle being chewed. Maybe because he has to use the remaining back teeth to chew. (How could he have come down so far?)
Is she as beautiful as they say? I hear my voice more like a nervous half-whisper. Am I talking to at least part of the man I used to know, or the swine with grease and gravy smeared around his mouth?
He’s got to crunching the bird foot, and it’s an obscene sound, undignified — I don’t think Sándor is coming back. I don’t think he ever will.
You’ll see for yourself, the swine grunts. They live up on the top floor. To make it harder for would-be lovers to get at her! His laugh is another undignified act, more a cackle.
I want to go now. And I do: I get up and walk out the door, when never have I done such a thing with my father. I find myself out in the common entrance foyer, darker than the usual gloomy dark, no one willing to put in a new light bulb; looking up the stairwell, imagining what this new couple look like, wondering why everyone has been so stirred to talking about them. Will they betray us?
I am taken by surprise at seeing her outside our flat as I shut the door on yet another of my father’s drinking bouts, his going from yelling to sniffling like a fucking baby.
Oh, she is surely what they say, and more.
Jó éstet, I greet.
Down the steps she comes, barely a sound of shoes on worn stone treads. Coal black hair that shines with her inner richness, green eyes such as I have rarely seen; eyebrows in an arch as if superiority were stamped on her the moment of conception; a Magyar complexion smoother than normal porcelain. For some reason, though, I hear echo of my father’s voice asking: What does beauty mean if it does not reflect the inner person? What if an informer hides behind the beautiful mask?
She wears an overcoat that is modest and cheap, as can be expected, dark brown, coarse wool, that little suits, as if far less than her deserving. She looks like she belongs anywhere but here. I’m not sure about the haughty look, though. Then her mouth opens. Pálfia Péterne Aranka.
(Nice name.) The formal introduction, wife of Péter Pálfia, guarding her first name — Aranka — as she might her private womanhood. She speaks in a tone lower than my mother’s, so it is a husky voice — but musical too — unless she smokes. Her view of me is slightly askance and I guess she thinks I’m just another of the whispering, suspicious neighbours, not to be trusted myself, for she goes to move past. I should be easing out of her way, but am too slow and she brings to a halt. That eyebrow arches a different height. Excuse me?
Sorry, I say. I didn’t mean …
I am your new neighbour, on the fourth floor, she says looking at the number on our door, which is 1B. I have seen you go through that door. Your name — if you don’t think I am prying. Or …?
Or what?
Nothing. She shakes her head.
A spy?
She grins. Well, it’s what they’re saying.
>
You don’t look like one. (But can you trust looks?)
Thank you. Do you mean that?
Sure I do. I am Szabó Attila.
Pleased to meet you, Attila.
And I you, Mrs Pálfia.
I prefer to be called Aranka.
I hurry to open the front door for her, receive a curt nod, but with a nice smile for my troubles. Finger a little nervously in my pocket, find the handkerchief Papa gave me. Feel less nervous. Step out into a cool October night. A young couple are paused across the street, in giggling exchange. This Aranka does not look the type to giggle much.
She turns left. Where Pál lives is a right turn. I go left.
Her walk is rhythmic, athletic, and she turns heads. I don’t think she knows her effect, for she is pulled into her coat collar. Night is falling fast.
She surprises by suddenly turning, asking on the walk, what direction I’m headed. Just walking. And you?
I am going to join a bread queue, her smile is quite gone.
A bread queue …? When if their plans were working … I dare to risk.
Is anything working?
I come alongside her and shake head, no. Check out her face again, in case I was overcome by her looks.
She doesn’t speak for several strides. Maybe she’s reassessing me, that I could be luring her into saying something culpable. And I don’t want her thinking like that for a moment.
What classification are you? But she’s not answering, turns left. I know the route to the nearest bakery. I know those smarmy faces behind the counter with power over us: the fat woman whose size says she eats her share and some of ours; the bald-headed chief baker, whose ever-running sweat is sure to drip into our dough.
My father is X.
That has a reaction, though she pretends not. Oh? She says. That mustn’t be very pleasant for him or you.
I am proud he is X.